I think if I were going to be diagnosed with a mental disorder it would most appropriately be GAD, though it's said to be a common comorbidity of ADHD so who knows. I practice mindfulness, which helps a little when things get bad.
I go back and forth on it, though, because (as I mentioned) I've been successful in "real life" without any kind of psych treatment and looking back on my childhood "bad" decisions that were held up as evidence of my badness and the necessity of medicating me, e.g. neglecting my summer homework in favor of playing outside every day, I have to say that a lot of them (including that one) were great decisions. The worst thing was that the world was unwilling to let me be a child, and the best thing was that I said fuck you to the world and was a child anyway. Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot of people can benefit from them, and I also believe they would have stolen something from me that could never be repaid.
What if the world had simply accepted me for the person I was? There would have been no need, then, to engineer some misguided praise in the hope of turning me into something that I wasn't. I don't practically expect the world to be fair, nor to supply a weirdly-shaped hole for every weirdly-shaped peg, but I'm not sure it's best to reach for the DSM-5 whenever such a peg appears.
Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing
me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot
of people can benefit from them, and I also believe
they would have stolen something from me that could
never be repaid.
Amen. Medication would have made some things easier but would, I think, have robbed me of some things as well.
I had to come up with tons of strategies to work around ADHD and/or anxiety or whatever the hell it was. Because I literally didn't know what those things were, and I went through school before ADHD diagnoses started to really boom. Would I have used ADHD as a crutch? I honestly don't know. I can honestly say I'd have been tempted to.
I wish that childhood had been easier, and I had known that I wasn't "lazy or crazy."
Frankly I wish I could have just had therapy and a life coach for that stuff, rather than meds. Teach me to fish, don't hand me a fish.
This thread made me think. Some of the symptoms of ADD seem to describe much of my behavior to a shocking precision, mostly lack of executive function. But I wasn't hyperactive so I wasn't sure it applied to me. Still, I lose track of time when working on projects I enjoy. That doesn't even invalidate the progress I make on them, but the act of me deciding to work on them on a whim and forgetting everything else until I'm too tired to go on is a very common occurrence for me.
At a young age my parents were told by someone I did not have AD(H)D. I believed them. But later when I was living on my own I felt his methodology lacked credibility. (He was a person who called his treatment "turbo-drive psychotherapy" and dismissed questions about its effectiveness, calling them "pooh-poohing the next generation of technology". Not really someone who would want to hold an intellectual dialogue).
Looking back on it in the present I realized that if my parents were going to tell me I was or wasn't X or Y at that age, I was going to believe them - for as long as they were physically around to assert it. It had always felt wrong to disagree. For various reasons I had internalized that argument was not a means to find truth but instead an unreasonable risk when you could be locked in a closet for it.
I'm not sure what being diagnosed today would do for me since it wouldn't change any of that. Though it could give some more clarity to my past.
